When I first started publishing short stories, back in 2010, I was newly out of college, and my vision of the world was very much structured by institutions.
Thanks for the Gunn story, hadn't seen that before and it looks very much like something I would like, and my chum William Pauley III would create. He's a right metamorphosis-Kafka freak in his own way.
Don't forget the Ted Chiang story was the basis for the Denis Villeneuve film Arrival [Ooops, I see you have that in the footnotes]
I think it's a classic example of a writerly trick, where the "puzzle" of the alien language and all the nonsense about Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis conceals both a devastating emotional punch like a precision warhead, and a fascinating parable about circularity and amor fati, as in Nietzsche.
The puzzle stuff is like busywork to keep the rational brain engaged while the emotional being is engaged with the daughter story. The reveal of the Chinese general is yawn but the reveal about the daughter is astonishing. The film executed this very well, not getting bogged down in the brainy stuff and letting the emotions do their thing.
I actually did a thing about the Nietzsche parallels in the Chiang story/the film adaptation.
I love Ted Chiang's fiction, and granted my experience teaching undergrads and in MFA programs is not wholly representative (I'm an SF writer myself and work at colleges and universities in the NYC area). But I would argue that he's a lot more well-known than you're suggesting here and for some pretty straightforward reasons. Most importantly his "Story of Your Life" was (largely faithfully) adapted into the movie Arrival, which received 8 Oscar nominations including best picture. Chiang also publishes (imo) half-baked, ultra-digestible Gladwell-esque takes on AI in the New Yorker, which I have to think ups his visibility as well, in both mainstream and literary circles. Joyce Carol Oates reviewed his most recent story collection for that same publication -- the collection in question was published by Knopf. And if anything his persona/schtick exactly matches with what mainstream and literary folks want and expect an SF writer to be. That may well be a coincidence, but the "STEM nerd who is secretly sensitive" is a trope we can see all over the most mainstream parts of the genre (there's always one Star Trek character who plays this role for example). I'm not saying he's doing it on purpose... but if he were, this is what it would make sense for him to do.
It is possible for people who exclusively read and write domestic realism to work in cw higher ed, but Chiang is objectively a success on their terms, to the extent such a thing exists anymore in the literary world.
I agree, and I also thought those AI articles have been super underbaked. I have cleaved Ted Chiang short story writer and Ted Chiang take-haver into two different people in my head and I'm much happier.
I grew up reading sci-fi stories and novels, also literary work, and also commercial/popular fiction. All have human value. It's the value that matters most, not the broad genres. When young, to me, sci-fi could seem literary, while the literary could seem like a kind of socio sci-fi experience, and commercial/popular fiction could seem epic. With aging and more experience, perspective can shift, the human value of the works can be perceived differently, even as the values remain.
Most intriguing, resonant, and moving can be those works that cross and contain all three broad types of genre: the sci-fi (especially the socio sci-fi), the literary, and the popular/commercial: "The Lottery," "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas," "Yellow Woman," "The Yellow Wallpaper, "A Modest Proposal," "The Little Match Girl," "The Third Bank of the River," and many, many others.
Of course there's a lot of pap in every "genre" or category and type, but some gems too.
This piece illuminates (or maybe casts a raking light) on a lot of stuff that's been on my mind lately. I'm trying to teach myself to write fantasy stories, and it's so difficult to unlearn the things I learned in undergrad fiction workshops a decade ago, where the legacy of literary minimalism had kind of warped into this idea that emotional payoffs are in bad taste. The idea that you can acknowledge your characters' feelings without being accused of "telling not showing," or even that it's okay to end a story on a non-ambiguous note, is hard to reaccess.
I read "Exhalation" a long time ago, probably slightly before workshops completed their hijacking of my brain. I don't remember much of the story but I do remember an overwhelming impression of its beauty. I wish I'd paid more attention to that.
I think, as someone outside literary circles, hard to understand what being unknown in literary circles means, when whenever Ted Chiang releases a book it gets prime real estate in book stores. Or, whenever he writes an article about AI, it's immediately reposted by people in my circle, none of whom are writers.
There's probably a whole separate post to be written on Chiang's nonfiction, and how a story writer manages to be taken seriously enough by other corners of the media space to publish work on tech, capitalism and AI for the likes of The New Yorker. And that's not even to mention the content of his views, on the use of AI in creative writing in particular, which I find fascinating in relation to his fiction (I would have expected a slow, ideas-based sci-fi author to be more amenable to using AI to speed up his process than the typical literary writer would be, but turns out that's not the case)
He hasn't published a book in six years, which would be a pretty natural reason for his name to fade from the radar -- but I think it's overstating the case to call Chiang "virtually unknown in literary circles." As you point out, he was profiled in the New Yorker in 2017, and has written for them regularly since. So how much distance is there really between him and someone like Link, or Beattie, or Hempel, by that metric of "taking [x] seriously"? (It does seem true that Moore is on a different level of MFA canonization.)
Right, I'm willing to believe that Chiang is rarely or never taught in MFA fiction workshops as a model of the short story form -- and that in that social sphere, he's not thought of as essential (or to put it a different way: inescapable) compared to the other writers named here. But that's a much narrower claim about literary reputation.
standing arm in arm to state that i also think ted chiang is better and worth more critical study than lorrie moore
i don't have the bona fides to back this up other than that i, an MFA-less rube and casual SFF reader, have thought about ted chiang stories about 100x more
Definitely agree that a big part of Ted Chiang’s success is his stories rewarding different levels / types of engagement. Greg Egan was a great contrasting example, because from a pure ideas perspective you could argue he is the “best” SF writer today. But until you really really *get* the idea in one of his stories (or even if you do), they are often just… not that fun to read? It does feel quite similar to engaging with a college lecture: fascinating, perhaps, but “fun” is maybe the wrong word. Whereas in a Ted Chiang story you can just let the emotions wash over you and come back for the ideas on a second pass. And this allows him to capture a much wider audience than he might otherwise.
I felt similarly surprised when I saw Chiang give a talk in real life. I was like, “you’re telling me this is the guy who wrote ‘The Lifecycle of Software Objects’??”. Glad to know I wasn’t the only one to feel this way…
I feel about Kelly Link and her rise much as you do about Ted Chiang. I’ve ordered his first collection and look forward to parsing the sci-fi tropes & emotional punch. It almost gives me hope that one CAN just “write what they want”.
It's theory fiction, but the theory is the basic scientific theory people with computer science degrees and engineer parents would be very familiar with.
Substack is terrible at letting me know when someone responds to my comments: theory fiction is either broadly “theory” (pomo poststruct, language games, etc.) that is expressed partially through fiction, or fictions preoccupied with the implications of theory. One excellent example of theory fiction is Cyclonopedia by Reza Negarestani. A lot of SF can be fruitfully read as theory fiction, especially Chiang.
I didn't realize that TC's novella "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" is so hard to find, so I hope that there's no ethical issues in sharing this pdf:
Oh I didn't know it was hard to come by! I bought a copy the first week it came out, all those years ago. I was so excited by the idea of Ted Chiang novel-lile thing :)
I don’t want to live in a world without either Lorrie Moore or Ted Chiang. Both make me feel emotionally devastated.
I do think to write fiction you have to have the mandate of heaven. You have to have an exclusive claim to some cultural territory people actually care about. MFAs have lost that plot.
I think Milton, Spenser, Shakespeare probably thought: “I’m a great poet, so I’m going to write about the most popular things.” At some point, the thinking swapped: “I’m a great poet, so I’m going to write about the most obscure things.”
I think blaming MFAs is a cop-out. To have great writers you need readers who seek out great writing. There aren't a lot of readers like that anymore, and MFAs are really not to blame. People have become addicted to media that constantly repeats their own ideas back to them, but that's the antithesis of great art. It's a cultural problem.
I agree, I don't think MFAs are to blame! I think maybe romanticism is, or modernism, or capitalism, or--like you say--our media diet. But I think the MFA is one place where the myth of "real art requires being unresponsive to the people" spreads.
I'm surprised no one has made the comparison with Borges. There's a man who took the idea-driven short story to unheard-of heights. But the Spanish-language literary world took Borges seriously. Le Guin never stopped pointing out how curiously compartmentalized the Anglo literary world tends to be, and maybe Chiang is the best current illustration of that.
Yes I agree it's astonishing how little influence Borges has had even in the anglophone sci-fi world. You hardly ever see a fake book review in a sci-fi journal for instance.
Here’s a hypothesis: I wonder if the people who dislike Chiang tend to be people who will regard his ideas as highly routine (e.g. people with philosophy or physics backgrounds) whereas the people who really like Chiang are usually not very familiar the way discussions of things like free will or thermodynamics usually work out? So for people who not informed about these things, Chiang is educational and paradoxical and revealing, but for people who are already familiar, he doesn’t have much of interest to say.
I have a philosophy background including a good bit of history of science, and my problem with most Chiang stories that I read is that I quickly recognize the idea that the story is about. After I recognize the idea, I’ve never felt like his stories have more to tell me. He works (to me) on the most obvious outward surface of his ideas.
Popularization does have value, but it tends to be dishonored for reasons that are very difficult to evade. However good the popularizer’s work may be, authorities in the popularizer’s field have no reason to read or care about the popularizer’s writing.
Yep, I think you're on to something. His stories are like articles more than stories. I'd rather read the Wikipedia article on the free will debate than a Ted Chiang story.
Thanks for the Gunn story, hadn't seen that before and it looks very much like something I would like, and my chum William Pauley III would create. He's a right metamorphosis-Kafka freak in his own way.
Don't forget the Ted Chiang story was the basis for the Denis Villeneuve film Arrival [Ooops, I see you have that in the footnotes]
I think it's a classic example of a writerly trick, where the "puzzle" of the alien language and all the nonsense about Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis conceals both a devastating emotional punch like a precision warhead, and a fascinating parable about circularity and amor fati, as in Nietzsche.
The puzzle stuff is like busywork to keep the rational brain engaged while the emotional being is engaged with the daughter story. The reveal of the Chinese general is yawn but the reveal about the daughter is astonishing. The film executed this very well, not getting bogged down in the brainy stuff and letting the emotions do their thing.
I actually did a thing about the Nietzsche parallels in the Chiang story/the film adaptation.
https://backtobackmovies.substack.com/p/back-to-back-64-everything-everywhere-167
Thanks AP. Saved to read later.
I love Ted Chiang's fiction, and granted my experience teaching undergrads and in MFA programs is not wholly representative (I'm an SF writer myself and work at colleges and universities in the NYC area). But I would argue that he's a lot more well-known than you're suggesting here and for some pretty straightforward reasons. Most importantly his "Story of Your Life" was (largely faithfully) adapted into the movie Arrival, which received 8 Oscar nominations including best picture. Chiang also publishes (imo) half-baked, ultra-digestible Gladwell-esque takes on AI in the New Yorker, which I have to think ups his visibility as well, in both mainstream and literary circles. Joyce Carol Oates reviewed his most recent story collection for that same publication -- the collection in question was published by Knopf. And if anything his persona/schtick exactly matches with what mainstream and literary folks want and expect an SF writer to be. That may well be a coincidence, but the "STEM nerd who is secretly sensitive" is a trope we can see all over the most mainstream parts of the genre (there's always one Star Trek character who plays this role for example). I'm not saying he's doing it on purpose... but if he were, this is what it would make sense for him to do.
It is possible for people who exclusively read and write domestic realism to work in cw higher ed, but Chiang is objectively a success on their terms, to the extent such a thing exists anymore in the literary world.
It's true I left my MFA in 2014, and his profile has certainly gone up in the lit world since then!
I agree, and I also thought those AI articles have been super underbaked. I have cleaved Ted Chiang short story writer and Ted Chiang take-haver into two different people in my head and I'm much happier.
Thanks for this comment, it rings true to me as I glance over at the Junot Diaz blurb on the cover of his book.
I grew up reading sci-fi stories and novels, also literary work, and also commercial/popular fiction. All have human value. It's the value that matters most, not the broad genres. When young, to me, sci-fi could seem literary, while the literary could seem like a kind of socio sci-fi experience, and commercial/popular fiction could seem epic. With aging and more experience, perspective can shift, the human value of the works can be perceived differently, even as the values remain.
Most intriguing, resonant, and moving can be those works that cross and contain all three broad types of genre: the sci-fi (especially the socio sci-fi), the literary, and the popular/commercial: "The Lottery," "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas," "Yellow Woman," "The Yellow Wallpaper, "A Modest Proposal," "The Little Match Girl," "The Third Bank of the River," and many, many others.
Of course there's a lot of pap in every "genre" or category and type, but some gems too.
This piece illuminates (or maybe casts a raking light) on a lot of stuff that's been on my mind lately. I'm trying to teach myself to write fantasy stories, and it's so difficult to unlearn the things I learned in undergrad fiction workshops a decade ago, where the legacy of literary minimalism had kind of warped into this idea that emotional payoffs are in bad taste. The idea that you can acknowledge your characters' feelings without being accused of "telling not showing," or even that it's okay to end a story on a non-ambiguous note, is hard to reaccess.
I read "Exhalation" a long time ago, probably slightly before workshops completed their hijacking of my brain. I don't remember much of the story but I do remember an overwhelming impression of its beauty. I wish I'd paid more attention to that.
This is beautifully put. I believe it's possible to reaccess that earlier attunement to a broader range of beauty. But in practice it's hard.
I think, as someone outside literary circles, hard to understand what being unknown in literary circles means, when whenever Ted Chiang releases a book it gets prime real estate in book stores. Or, whenever he writes an article about AI, it's immediately reposted by people in my circle, none of whom are writers.
There's probably a whole separate post to be written on Chiang's nonfiction, and how a story writer manages to be taken seriously enough by other corners of the media space to publish work on tech, capitalism and AI for the likes of The New Yorker. And that's not even to mention the content of his views, on the use of AI in creative writing in particular, which I find fascinating in relation to his fiction (I would have expected a slow, ideas-based sci-fi author to be more amenable to using AI to speed up his process than the typical literary writer would be, but turns out that's not the case)
He hasn't published a book in six years, which would be a pretty natural reason for his name to fade from the radar -- but I think it's overstating the case to call Chiang "virtually unknown in literary circles." As you point out, he was profiled in the New Yorker in 2017, and has written for them regularly since. So how much distance is there really between him and someone like Link, or Beattie, or Hempel, by that metric of "taking [x] seriously"? (It does seem true that Moore is on a different level of MFA canonization.)
I agree. I think Ted chiang has been taken up by the “mainstream” literary establishment as “one of the good ones.”
"One of the good ones" is exactly right. The house slave made it out of the genre ghetto.
Right, I'm willing to believe that Chiang is rarely or never taught in MFA fiction workshops as a model of the short story form -- and that in that social sphere, he's not thought of as essential (or to put it a different way: inescapable) compared to the other writers named here. But that's a much narrower claim about literary reputation.
standing arm in arm to state that i also think ted chiang is better and worth more critical study than lorrie moore
i don't have the bona fides to back this up other than that i, an MFA-less rube and casual SFF reader, have thought about ted chiang stories about 100x more
That's actually a great metric!
Definitely agree that a big part of Ted Chiang’s success is his stories rewarding different levels / types of engagement. Greg Egan was a great contrasting example, because from a pure ideas perspective you could argue he is the “best” SF writer today. But until you really really *get* the idea in one of his stories (or even if you do), they are often just… not that fun to read? It does feel quite similar to engaging with a college lecture: fascinating, perhaps, but “fun” is maybe the wrong word. Whereas in a Ted Chiang story you can just let the emotions wash over you and come back for the ideas on a second pass. And this allows him to capture a much wider audience than he might otherwise.
I felt similarly surprised when I saw Chiang give a talk in real life. I was like, “you’re telling me this is the guy who wrote ‘The Lifecycle of Software Objects’??”. Glad to know I wasn’t the only one to feel this way…
Oh it's such a common experience! It is shocking how retiring and unemotional he is. I've heard multiple people mention it.
I feel about Kelly Link and her rise much as you do about Ted Chiang. I’ve ordered his first collection and look forward to parsing the sci-fi tropes & emotional punch. It almost gives me hope that one CAN just “write what they want”.
Life is very hard for short fiction writers these days.
It's theory fiction, but the theory is the basic scientific theory people with computer science degrees and engineer parents would be very familiar with.
What is theory fiction?
Substack is terrible at letting me know when someone responds to my comments: theory fiction is either broadly “theory” (pomo poststruct, language games, etc.) that is expressed partially through fiction, or fictions preoccupied with the implications of theory. One excellent example of theory fiction is Cyclonopedia by Reza Negarestani. A lot of SF can be fruitfully read as theory fiction, especially Chiang.
Hi Naomi,
I didn't realize that TC's novella "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" is so hard to find, so I hope that there's no ethical issues in sharing this pdf:
https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/voices.uchicago.edu/dist/8/644/files/2017/08/Chiang-Lifecycle-of-Software-Objects-q3tsuw.pdf
Oh I didn't know it was hard to come by! I bought a copy the first week it came out, all those years ago. I was so excited by the idea of Ted Chiang novel-lile thing :)
I’ve been meaning to read him for a while. Picked up a copy today after reading this!
I don’t want to live in a world without either Lorrie Moore or Ted Chiang. Both make me feel emotionally devastated.
I do think to write fiction you have to have the mandate of heaven. You have to have an exclusive claim to some cultural territory people actually care about. MFAs have lost that plot.
I think Milton, Spenser, Shakespeare probably thought: “I’m a great poet, so I’m going to write about the most popular things.” At some point, the thinking swapped: “I’m a great poet, so I’m going to write about the most obscure things.”
I think blaming MFAs is a cop-out. To have great writers you need readers who seek out great writing. There aren't a lot of readers like that anymore, and MFAs are really not to blame. People have become addicted to media that constantly repeats their own ideas back to them, but that's the antithesis of great art. It's a cultural problem.
I agree, I don't think MFAs are to blame! I think maybe romanticism is, or modernism, or capitalism, or--like you say--our media diet. But I think the MFA is one place where the myth of "real art requires being unresponsive to the people" spreads.
I'm surprised no one has made the comparison with Borges. There's a man who took the idea-driven short story to unheard-of heights. But the Spanish-language literary world took Borges seriously. Le Guin never stopped pointing out how curiously compartmentalized the Anglo literary world tends to be, and maybe Chiang is the best current illustration of that.
Yes I agree it's astonishing how little influence Borges has had even in the anglophone sci-fi world. You hardly ever see a fake book review in a sci-fi journal for instance.
Here’s a hypothesis: I wonder if the people who dislike Chiang tend to be people who will regard his ideas as highly routine (e.g. people with philosophy or physics backgrounds) whereas the people who really like Chiang are usually not very familiar the way discussions of things like free will or thermodynamics usually work out? So for people who not informed about these things, Chiang is educational and paradoxical and revealing, but for people who are already familiar, he doesn’t have much of interest to say.
I have a philosophy background including a good bit of history of science, and my problem with most Chiang stories that I read is that I quickly recognize the idea that the story is about. After I recognize the idea, I’ve never felt like his stories have more to tell me. He works (to me) on the most obvious outward surface of his ideas.
Popularization does have value, but it tends to be dishonored for reasons that are very difficult to evade. However good the popularizer’s work may be, authorities in the popularizer’s field have no reason to read or care about the popularizer’s writing.
Yep, I think you're on to something. His stories are like articles more than stories. I'd rather read the Wikipedia article on the free will debate than a Ted Chiang story.